Who picked the dogs up? Well, that
would be American freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy.

The freshly crowned silver-medal slopestyler from Telluride, Colo., picked up four puppies
and their mother on the streets of Rosa Khutor and he's making arrangements to have
them sent home to the United States.

"I've been around animals all my
life," Kenworthy said of the hundreds of dogs roaming the streets in Sochi and the mountains above the Olympic
city. "It's hard to watch."

Kenworthy tweeted a picture of himself
cuddling four of the dogs. "Puppy love is real to puppies," he wrote.

Activists have been picking up dogs from the streets and putting them up at
their homes or in temporary shelters before finding an owner elsewhere.

Stray dogs are a common sight on the streets of Russian cities, but with massive construction in the area the street dog population in Sochi and the Olympic park has soared. Useful as noisy, guard dogs, workers feed them to keep them nearby and protect buildings. The dogs - - friendly rather than feral - soon lose their value and become strays.